The Sketch Effect founder & CEO, William Warren, has released his first book, The Conquering Creative: 9 Shifts to Build an Unstoppable Creative Business, available now on Amazon and other retailers.

Endorsed by New York Times bestselling Author, Jon Acuff, President of Savannah College of Art and Design Paula Wallace, and bestselling author of the Sketchnote Handbook, Mike Rohde, The Conquering Creative is a must-have for any creative looking to grow his or her career or business.

"This is a business book… but it's for creative people," says Warren. "It's for any creative who has ever struggled with the business side of things, wants to take their freelance career to the next level, graduate with their art degree with confidence, or quit that day job to pursue full-time creative work."

The book has its origin in William's own story. Having successfully launched and scaled his creative business for the last ten years, Warren wanted to create a resource to help others do the same.

Drawing on lessons learned from nearly a decade of running a successful creative business, Warren breaks the book into three sections: shifts in thinking, shifts in actions, and shifts in outcomes.

Across the nine chapters of this book, Warren tells stories and shares anecdotes from the ups and downs of his own journey, along with practical advice, tips, and tools. Topics include sales, marketing and promotion, soft skills, productivity, pricing, systems and processes, strategy and vision, and many more.

The book also features 150 hand-drawn illustrations created by Warren himself.

"My book had to have illustrations… it had to!" he says. "First of all, illustration is my first love and any book of mine would be inauthentic without them. Second, visuals help to reinforce the ideas, making them more understandable and memorable. And finally, the illustrations make the book more fun!"

And fun is one of the goals Warren is aiming for with The Conquering Creative. In order to make a business book appealing to people who don't normally like business books, there is nearly an illustration, diagram or graphic on every page.

The book also features nine interviews with a diverse group of creative professionals and entrepreneurs, each representing a different creative field from graphic design to blogging.

"One of my favorite features of the book is the interviews with other 'Conquering Creatives'," added William. "The concepts in this book are so important that I didn't want it to come from just myself. I wanted a whole chorus of voices backing me up and reinforcing the core idea, which is 'You can do it! Business is not as hard as you think!' And they really knocked it out of the park with their advice and encouragement."

As the world's largest marketplace for creative and professional services, Fiverr(R) is pleased to announce today Series C funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Qumra Capital and additional private investors for $30M, accelerating a large scale shift toward a new workplace where independent workers and businesses can connect on a global scale.

As the global economy continues to evolve -- with freelancers playing a more vital role every year -- one company is poised to capitalize on this area of tremendous growth.

"By 2020 the number of independent workers is predicted to double, with online freelancing increasing at an even faster rate," says Fiverr Co-Founder and CEO Micha Kaufman. "The landscape of opportunity far exceeds the current playing field. This funding is an affirmation of the brand resonance and trust we have established in this multi-billion dollar market of opportunity."

Services-as-a-Product - Introducing Fiverr 3.0

The first generation of freelancing sites was based on the traditional staffing model, centering on recruiting and outsourcing. Fiverr takes a unique approach by providing an "e-commerce experience" that empowers creative people to package their skills as products -- enabling the buying and selling of services in just a few clicks -- and eliminating any negotiation friction. This pioneering model effectively offers "Services-as-a-Product," or SaaP.

"One of the many reasons Fiverr is so exciting is that it is the only service-based marketplace modeled on e-commerce platforms," says Adam Fisher, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. "Like eBay and Amazon, customers simply browse, search, and buy, selecting from more than 100 categories and millions of services. It's as easy as buying a book online. Why hire someone to do something that is done thousands of times a day for a pricey sum and an unknown delivery date when you can order for next day delivery on Fiverr?"

"We started introducing services for more than $5 two years ago and today the majority of our revenue is from orders well above $5," said Michiel Kotting, Partner at Accel Partners. "Fiverr continues to be the world's #1 global marketplace with an order being placed every 4.7 seconds. Few marketplaces can match Fiverr's product depth and liquidity."

Beginning today, with 10 categories, and rolling out across all categories in coming weeks, Fiverr 3.0 allows buyers to customize their search to suit their very particular needs. For example, if a small business wanted to purchase a voiceover for a new product launch video, it allows the buyer to search and sort by highly specific criteria such as whether the seller is top-rated along with gender, accent and region.

Through Fiverr's highly regarded community rating system, buyers have complete confidence in their purchases because they can fully see the seller's online reputation.

Be Local, Do Business Global

This third round of funding enables Fiverr to further accelerate growth and product releases and enable extensive marketing to bring the Fiverr vision to more people globally, transforming a freelancer's formerly limited local pool of clients into an endless demand for talent on a global scale. Fiverr also allows local businesses to source the most optimal and cost effective talent and services regardless of geography. This enables a Denver-based graphic artist to sell services to individuals and companies in London, Berlin and Sydney.

Fiverr is Community

In a world where many entrepreneurs work from home and occasionally feel isolated, Fiverr is more than a marketplace, it's also a meeting place for freelancers, providing the opportunities, support, and tools they need to turn their talents into sales. The new Fiverr 3.0 release enhances communications features and the ability for exchanges and knowledge sharing within the Fiverr community.

Erez Shachar, Managing Partner at Qumra Capital says, "As the future of work is increasingly dominated by freelancers, entrepreneurs and independent workers, Fiverr is positioning itself as the home for this rapidly growing community. We're excited about investing in a company that is central to the success of millions of participants in the Gig Economy."

About Fiverr

Browse. Buy. Done. Fiverr(R) gives you instant access to millions of Gigs from people who love what they do. It's the easiest way for individuals and businesses to get everything done, at unbeatable value. Fiverr is the world's largest marketplace for creative and professional services, currently listing over 3 million Gigs in more than 100 different categories across 196 countries. Fiverr is one of the top 130 websites in the world according to Alexa.com. With a team of 130 people, Fiverr has primary offices in New York, Miami, and Tel Aviv. The company is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Qumra Capital and a group of private investors.

Get Client With System (Get Client) has won the prestigious Two Comma Club Award from international marketing platform ClickFunnels, recognizing Get Client's unique online marketing strategy as the only company in Hong Kong to be invited to the U.S. to receive the award in person, after achieving over $12 million in sales in 2022.

Get Client has been in business for three years now, and has been known for its unique marketing strategies that have battled through the economic crisis and won the Two Comma Club Award last year. The award recognizes companies that have earned more than $1 million in revenue from a single marketing funnel in a single year. The Two Comma Club Award also signifies that Get Client is one of only 3% of the world's online marketing companies to have achieved this feat, and that the Get Client team has abandoned the traditional marketing mindset and applied a breakthrough reactive marketing strategy to analyze consumer psychology and drive real revenue results.

Nic Leung, founder of Get Client, said, "We believe that effective online marketing is not just about placing ads on social media platforms to get a seemingly unrealistic amount of attention or impression. Instead, marketing must be linked to actual revenue. Get Client will continue to promote a responsive marketing strategy to help clients achieve an efficient return on their investment. April Lo, another founder of Get Client, said, "Professional training is different from traditional teaching, we want to help trainers enter the market with unique marketing strategies to meet the market demand for knowledge. The knowledge gained by people will help them to be more competitive, and it will also help them to increase their income. Under the leadership of the two founders, Get Client has successfully created new market opportunities in the past three years despite the impact of the epidemic, and has become a guiding light for dozens of trainers and entrepreneurs in the professional training sector, generating nearly half a billion dollars in revenue for them.

Get Client was founded in 2020 with a focus on instant and responsive online marketing, combining sales and marketing strategies to create targeted marketing messages with efficient marketing funnels, so that potential consumers can take immediate action after receiving the messages and obtain high returns for clients in a cost-effective manner. In the future, Get Client will focus on the Southeast Asian market, helping clients around the world to apply reactive marketing strategies, while keeping up with the trend of big data and artificial intelligence technology, and continuously optimizing digital marketing to help clients develop potential markets and double their revenue results.

Freelancer wins US$6.7m task order with NASA and the National Institutes of Health in gene editing. Freelancer Limited (ASX: FLN, OTCQX: FLNCF), the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace by number of users and jobs posted, recently announced it has won a US$6.7 million task order for NASA and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of the Director (OD) Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives (DPCPSI) Office of Strategic Coordination (OSC).

NIH seeks two, three-phased contests to encourage technology development in two areas of strategic significance as part of Phase II of the NIH Somatic Cell Genome Editing (SCGE) program: 1. A highly efficient (e.g. 50%+ editing efficiency) non-viral delivery system capable of crossing the blood brain barrier to deliver genome editing machinery to a majority of target cell types in the central nervous system. 2. A programmable (e.g. 3+ configurations) delivery system to deliver genome editing machinery that can target specific tissues or cell types.

Somatic cell genome editing holds great promise in treating various diseases. However, current techniques in genome editing approaches, such as those based on CRISPR-Cas9, pose many challenges that need to be overcome before they can be widely used in the clinic. For example, the delivery of genome editors to clinically relevant cells and tissues and achievement of editing efficiency that is adequate for addressing human diseases.

These contests will be administered under the America COMPETES Act and will be launched on Freelancer.com with a total prize purse of US$6,000,000 (GMV).

This is the biggest task order to date under NASA’s NOIS2 and to be selected is testimony to the company’s track record of delivery to date under the program. It is expected that FLN will generate approximately US$700,000 in net revenue contribution for this task order.

About the NIH SCGE Program

The NIH Common Fund’s Somatic Cell Genome Editing (SCGE) program is working to improve the efficacy and specificity of gene editing approaches to help reduce the burden of common and rare diseases caused by genetic changes. SCGE is developing quality tools to perform and assess effective and safe genome editing in non-reproductive (“somatic”) cells of the body. These research tools will be made widely available to the research community to reduce the time and cost required to develop new therapies.

About Freelancer

Twelve-time Webby award-winning Freelancer.com is the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace by total number of users and projects posted. More than 60 million registered users have posted over 20 million projects and contests to date in over 2,000 areas as diverse as website development, logo design, marketing, copywriting, astrophysics, aerospace engineering and manufacturing. Freelancer owns Escrow.com, the leading provider of secure online payments and online transaction management for consumers and businesses on the Internet with over US$6 billion in transactions secured. Freelancer also owns Freightlancer & Loadshift, enterprise freight marketplaces with over 550 million kilometres of freight posted since inception. Freelancer Limited is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange under the ticker ASX:FLN and is quoted on OTCQX Best Market under the ticker FLNCF.